Slashdot Mirror
Digital Ink On Billboards
cdneng2 writes "The New York Times has this article on
a revolutionary new billboard. It uses digital ink, versus the typical CRT,
LCD, Neon, or Plasma displays that are so prominent on the newer billboards that
wastes electricity. From the article: 'By creating a paste made of tiny helix-shaped particles that can be minutely manipulated with electric charges to
reflect light in highly specific ways, Magink
can produce surfaces that look like paper but behave like electronic screens,
rendering high-resolution, full-color images without ink - or, as Magink
executives like to refer to the process, with digital ink.' The billboard
can display images at 70 frames per second." You can find more articles on the billboard technology on the Magink website.
Why is it that nowadays, any new cool thing is invented either for military or advertising use?
The day advertising and the military merge, we'll be in a world of hurt. They'll end up creating a pop-up that kills, I tell ya.
I know what colour I'm painting my walls next week! Every colour of the spectrum, in a slow rotation cycle defined by background noise and controled by my toaster that runs BSD!
Or I could just make a lifesize picture of Morgan Webb.
Edward@Tomato - /home/Edward/ man woman
man: no entry for woman in the manual.
"Qua!?"
combine that with a flash disk or some other form of solid state store and a transmeta or via c3 cpu and you've removed the three biggest power draws on a laptop.
essentially, i'd like a laptop that could do 24 hours w/o ac power.
oh, for older stories on /. about this, see here.
US Citizen living abroad? Register to vote!
Digital ink = finger painting.
Don't go to a brothel if you want to buy broth
I've seen photos of billboards, and that's not one. It has the appearance of an LCD with it's poor viewing angle. I hope that the picture displays better than it photographs...
Does this technology scale down? Could it provide a solution to e-books that provide as enjoyable an experience as dead trees?
Disclaimer: I haven't RTFA'd yet. Better go do that now.
Print quality image
Combining 5mm pixel pitch, an RGB color model with 4096 colors, and a superior contrast ratio of 14:1, magink digital ink technology achieves an extremely natural look that very much resembles the look of printed images on paper.
Compatibility to outdoor lighting environment
magink's digital ink display billboard is reflective of incident light and requires no integrated illumination. Light that falls on the display from either the sun or external light sources is actually beneficial to the visibility of the image. A beautiful image is maintainable under the full range of daylight conditions.
Low energy consumption
magink display does not require any power to maintain an image: the image is held under power-off conditions. Only when replacing one image with another does the display require punctual application of power in order to set the new image.
Since energy is needed only for refreshing the image and since magink's digital ink reflective display does not require back lighting, power consumption is low yielding less energy consumption, less heat dissipation and a longer mean time between failure (MTBF).
main(c,r){for(r=32;r;) printf(++c>31?c=!r--,"\n":c<r?" ":~c&r?" `":" #");}
Can it be produced cheaply enough -- and with high enough resolution -- to replace wallpaper?
Would it work as a large TV monitor? The frame rate is up to 70/sec, so the question, again, is resolution.
Opinions on the Twiddler2 hand-held keyboard?
Question: Does anybody know a simple explanation of why they don't go with back lighting or even perhaps rejiggering the dyes and black lighting this?
I guess I am a CRT snob, but I remember an IBM technology demo showing 400DPI. It was loosely based on LCD technology. It was backlit. Of course it did not have the refresh rate that this sign has.
Also notice those page sized tiles in the prototype.
Looks like this technology is heading our way fast.
Now, when I'm driving to work in the morning, a huge TV ad can distract me from driving, talking on my phone, reading the paper, shaving, eating, and putting my pants on.
How am I supposed to get ready for work!?
70 fps is definitely good enough for large monitors or display screens, for non gaming purposes. Heck, you could even make a nice big tv out of it.
He tried to kill me with a forklift!
I have a question. I haven't read into digital ink to any great extent,but I was wondering how easly these things coud be defaced? Do magnetic fields have any effect on these babies? If some sort of a electrical charge was dragged over the board how would this effect the image?
The display requires no power, only when changing images. Images are retained when the power is off.
Does it mean that, when my boss comes into my room and I'm watching pr0n, just turning my laptop off in panic will leave a big pr0n screen still visible?
Not good, not good...
If these become ubiquitous, we can only hope the advertising people responsible for magink's clown-in-a-garbage-compactor website will not be allowed anywhere near them.
Your Message Here, in a Flash
By MICHEL MARRIOTT
IN an industrial building on the Jersey City waterfront, workers busily printed supersize images for building facades and billboards intended to paper even the most casual viewer with brand awareness. Suspended near the rafters were full-color images of the youth tribes of Gap and giant emblems of National Basketball Association teams; on a far wall a portrait of a Seagram's vodka bottle hung two stories high.
In another corner, near the executive offices of Nomad Worldwide - one of the world's biggest large-format printers of the images that adorn billboards and those vinyl advertisements that wrap around entire buildings - was a different kind of ad, one that Keyvan Ebrahimi, the company's general manager, said might well represent the future of his industry.
"I think it's revolutionary," he said. "It certainly can replace billboards."
Standing on four metal legs, under two banks of fluorescent lights, was what appeared to be a modest-size billboard, measuring about 9 feet wide by 4 feet in height. Across its face, which looks like paper under glass, was a full-color advertisement for a soft drink maker. A few moments later the ad disappeared and was digitally replaced with a different one, and then another, like a screensaver cycling through images on a laptop computer screen.
But the surface of this billboard is not a liquid crystal diode screen - the energy-hungry display common to laptops and increasingly to cellphones, digital cameras, digital organizers and flat-screen computer monitors and television sets. Neither does this billboard share the light-emitting-diode technology that makes million-dollar-plus video screens light up the night in Times Square, Las Vegas and sports arenas around the world.
What makes the electronic billboard in Jersey City possible (and those installed for trials in London, Tokyo, Toronto and Panama City, among other locations) is an innovation by a New York-based display technology company whose name, Magink, is a combination of the words magic and ink. Its approach to imaging departs from the way most text, graphics and images are electronically presented, including the way expensive plasma screens work, as well as cathode-ray tubes, the old workhorses still found in most television sets and desktop computer monitors.
By creating a paste made of tiny helix-shaped particles that can be minutely manipulated with electric charges to reflect light in highly specific ways, Magink can produce surfaces that look like paper but behave like electronic screens, rendering high-resolution, full-color images without ink - or, as Magink executives like to refer to the process, with digital ink.
Ran Poliakine, chief executive of Magink, said the idea was to create visually compelling ads that could be replaced frequently - perhaps hourly, based on consumer response - and could be controlled remotely, all with far less energy and at a far lower cost than a video billboard.
Mr. Poliakine said Magink, which has research operations in England and Israel, was the first company to bring full-color digital ink displays to the marketplace. And soon, he said, its creation will begin competing more directly with traditional billboards in the $19 billion worldwide outdoor-advertising market. Nomad Worldwide, at its Jersey City plant, is among those evaluating the technology's potential.
"The last revolution was computer printing, and we believe the next revolution is digital ink on billboards," Mr. Poliakine said, comparing his company's advances to the first digital printing of billboard images more than a decade ago. Now, he added, his three-year-old company is also studying ways to expand the application of its core technology to personal electronics, including cellular telephones, cameras, hand-held computers and general video displays for laptops and televisions.
Magink prototype screens are capable of displaying video images at more than 70 frames a second, twice th
...runs Windows.
Is this really the best choice for something that thousands (or tens of thousands) of people will see each day as they drive down the highway?
At the PATH terminals in New Jersey, they have "PATHVision" displays. They run Windows. For a long time, virtually every day, pretty much half of the terminals were displaying an error dialog or worse. I also think I saw one of their ticket vending machines displaying a BSoD.
I really wish that companies who come up with stuff this cool would not depend so heavily on Windows. Imagine driving down the highway and seeing a gigantic, 50-foot-wide Blue Screen of Death. If my experiences with the PATHVision monitors were an example of what is to come... well, it could happen!
Here is what happens when airports depend upon Windows...
Honey, I shrunk the Cygwin
5mm =
The smallest frame size is 1m x 2m, so that would be 200 x 400 pixels, bigger than a Palm Pilot and bigger in pixel count but less square than a Zaurus.
4096 colors is low compared to a modern PC.
Opinions on the Twiddler2 hand-held keyboard?
Which shatters my fantasy of using it as a beamer replacement at home :-)
video images at more than 70 frames a second, twice the speed needed to produce smooth, cinematic motion
Thats all very well but what are the response times like? Practically all LCDs have a 60fps refresh time, but with a respone of 30ms or more, fast moving images would look horrid, leaving lots of streaks. The article doesn't mention the dot-pitch specs of these digital ink screens either, I'd like to see what sort of resolution and at what size these things could produce. If it had a fast enough reponse you could play Quake III on a 70ft screen!!!
I spent ages trying to think of sig, but never did
I thought this was going to be something that was cool, like eink. Maybe there's more to this they don't talk about, but I've seen displays that look like this at the local theater.
The ones I've seen look like real-life versions of vertical banner ads (coincidentally enough). Just a big LCD-ish display, whatever the actual technology. They're somewhat eyecatching in that they move, but... when it comes down to it, it's just an ad. Big deal.
Of course, I can think of more interesting uses for the system, if you put them absolutely everywhere and integrated touchscreen capabilities. But animated advertisements in real life are just about as interesting as the sort you find on the web. And you can't filter them either.
Don't think of it as a flame---it's more like an argument that does 3d6 fire damage
I really think those kind of technologies are going to be replacing paper during the next 20 years. It is really a market to invest in.
The advantages are pretty big compared to electronical displays and paper. It is "permanent" (eInk) like paper (read no battery to keep it displayed), and uses very little electricity to change actually the content of the paper. But in the same time, we can change the content very easily. So far the eBooks were bulky, and inefficient. The new eBooks would be terribly efficient compared to those one.
In the end, you have a nice book that can contain lot of books. It is really great. I will finally have those CS books on paper instead of my monitor.
I searched all the comments above, and couldn't find the obligatory post about por...oops pr0n. This can't be /. - where the HELL am I?
The Mothership
Magink, is a combination of the words magic and ink.
HOLY SHIT, I would have never made that connection, it's completely counter-intuitive, and definitely not something that jumps right out at you.
He tried to kill me with a forklift!
It's pretty clear that FMEB was manipulated into not using the epithet on their album because in concert the word flows freely.
And it was 1970, but you probably weren't born yet, so you get cut a little slack.
*shrug* All I have are recordings. I never go to concerts, not then, not now. I stand by my statement. :)
It's my eye sight you see, it's failing for, err, ahh, some reason....
The Mothership
They're trying to use fuel cells to get more life out of laptops :P
I don't think you can recharge a fuel cell though.. which sucks
Until *these* are hacked! Large display, high-profile markets, 70fps... going to be a fun commute that day! -S
A family in their minivan riding down the road, all of a sudden a billboard flashing red and yellow advertising viagra pops out of nowhere distracting hundreds of drivers causing a car accidents all over.
Seriously. Good intention, bad idea. At least it'll give hacker groups the ability to show their views to the world.
Candy-Coated Knowledge
Let's try scaling this technology up the curve a little:
- 10-bit color (4096 colors) will become 16-bit and then 24-bit.
- 5mm pixels will become 1mm and then 1/10thmm
- the borders between the pages appear 1 pixel wide, and will thus vanish
- cost of $8,000 will drop to $2,500, then $500.
Yes, looks good!
Ceci n'est pas une signature
A PDA that you can scroll the screen out to a decent size and when finished scroll it up and back into your pocket.
Thank you Lord for SciFi leading the way in Development of technology
- Needleless injections from Startrek
- Personal Communicators from Startrek
- Smokey Screens for projecting images from Seaquest DSV
- Flexible screens from Earth Final Conflict
I am a part time Sci-fi fan, you full time addicts must have some more examples Dont try to think outside the square - Instead realize there are no limitsThe weathers here - Wish you were beautiful
After all, they tend to start using new technology pretty fast.
This message has been ROT-13 encrypted twice for higher security.
Wait a minute, what do you mean there's no cartel? You mean people can self-publish and get retail exposure (taking up a full display desk even) in actual shops? Call yourself an industry? Pah!
How about using a display like this with flourescent particles and then surrounding it in heavy UV argon/mercury tubes.
I'm just thinking that if it's so much like paper, then that's one of the ways paper billboards are enhanced for better nighttime viewing.
Cartoon images could potentially be quite intense. Think of, for instance, the Simpsons done this way.
But as cool as this is, I still think that in the long-term we're going to see effiecient, mass produced, high powered lasers dominate the outdoor display market and perhaps other display markets as well. But since high powered lasers are still a very long way from cheap at this point, this is a cool near-term solution.
saving power can be complemented by better batteries. if i double my battery life *and* cut power usage by a factor of ten, then i get a 20x boost in battery life. if what i described coupled with fuel cells would give me even more than 24 hours, hey, neat!
and i think fuel cells can be recharged.
US Citizen living abroad? Register to vote!
How long before they get sued by someone who crashes their car after being distracted by a moving image one a billboard....
If this were advanced sufficiently, I could then even play bf1942 on this once I realized said female was imaginary and never came over in the first place.
Buy Steampunk Clothing Online!
The Bigger The Headache The Bigger the Pill
Ever heard of a silo? ;-)
The truth shall set you free!
The Iraq war was, if not military advertising for the Bush re-election campaign ?
An Eye for an Eye will make the whole world blind - Gandhi
Flash disks are never going to be usable or affordable. Some solid-state memory type may come along, but when you can only write each bit a few thousand times, your disk is pretty much useless to run a modern OS off.
So...when Doom 3 comes out will gamerz be hacking into them to play it on the l3373s7 of screenz?
14:1 is superior to what??? Common CRT, LCD, plasma screens and projectors have contrast ratios of hundreds or even thousands to one.
Some days my car should be red. Some days blue. Some days a nice mauve. Then polka dots that change colors. How about flames that really flicker? Can't imagine flames on my wagon, but why not? Checkerboard? Heck, you can actually play checkers! Or chess. Or Othello. Backgammon. Hah, you can even play tetris. I can have my phone number flash on the side when I pass a cute girl (oh wait, I drive a wagon). I can have messages flash on the back telling that moron driving 30 in a 50 what I think of them. There's a world of possibilities here!
-- If god wanted me to have a sig, he'd have given me a sense of humor.
But the surface of this billboard is not a liquid crystal diode screen...
Of course, it seems serious when one explain acronyms like LCD. But mixing display and diode, even if errors does happen, is not good presage for the quality of the research in the article. Smell like corporate announcement camouflaged as news.
a New York-based display technology company whose name, Magink, is a combination of the words magic and ink
What is the level of the NYT reader? Even me, not native english speaker, had comprehended the play on words. Smell badder by the minute.
Magink prototype screens are capable of displaying video images at more than 70 frames a second, twice the speed needed to produce smooth, cinematic motion.
If movies can go at 24 pps, 70 is quite 3 time what is needed, not 2. Is this really the technology section?
MS-Windows is unsuitable unless the advertising contracts have clauses about defacement, BSOD, MSTDs and other causes of down time. QNX, BSD, Linux and other systems are much more suitable for embedded systems being smaller, more secure and capable of providing the uptime required to fulfill a normal advertising contract.
More likely MS-Windows was mentioned because it's a MLM scheme that's wrapping up and the top piers are making one last push before it goes under.
Beta is broken and the link to classic doesn't work. Stop wasting our time or there won't be anybody left here.
I wonder what a /. FP would look like on that thing?
--- root@127.0.0.1
So you'll have a holodek. Really good for XXX.
--- How to use Slashdot
In other words, they failed to get the resolution high enough for use in displays and standard digital paper, and now they only thing it's good for is billboards. Cool, but not nearly as cool as what all the digital ink companies promised we'd have by now.
The TV will just show stuff like grass growing :)
He tried to kill me with a forklift!
According to research at an English university, advertising billboards are large and difficult to ignore.
essentially, i'd like a laptop that could do 24 hours w/o ac power.
:)
I agree. The bulky transformer boxes on the power cable that convert from ac to dc are a pain and add a lot of weight to your bag.
Karma police, I've given all I can, it's not enough, I've given all I can, but we're still on the payroll.
I read an article about this a few weeks ago (can't be bothered googling) but basically someone has scaled it down to ebook size but its only b&w at the moment. Good enough for me, how many novels have you read in colour? Apparently the contrast is as good as paper. One of these beasties and a P2P app and the nappster of books is here!
In no time we'll see this used in packaging. With a refresh rate of 70 Hz, this digital ink can be combined with flat batteries (thin sandwich of metals and electrolites) and embedded tiny controllers: Annoying animated package anyone ?
And of course it'll be used as display on laptop computers...
Actually, it won't be revolutionary until it involves putting marketing people up against a wall... :>
1970 was actually in the 1960s. They ran from 1961-01-01 to 1970-12-31. Why? Because there was no year zero {otherwise, Pol Pot would have won}.
If a billboard is digital, it's hackable. If it's hackable, we'll restyle it with pron! The world is getting better and better...
I want my karma, and I want it now!
This can be a little dangerous, if placed near to highways.
If you live in NYC, and have driven down the west side high way, there's a billboard, a tv billboard, which you see when you drive south around 23rd street in Manhattan. Am I the only one who gets a little distracted by these things? Anytime I pass by, I have to make a concerted effort NOT to have my eyes flit back and forth.
What about the ones in Times Square you may ask? They are MUCH MUCH higher up, out of line of sight for drivers. This one is about 3 stories high at about a few hundred feet away from the road. Ideal for drivers watching.
--
"I'm not bright. Big words confuse me. But Wanda loves me and that should be enough for you." - Cosmo
In this country, we have a few billboards which consist of a row of triangular prisms, disposed vertically, parallel to one another, and able to revolve on spindles. At one end of each spindle is a cog wheel, and a chain connects them all to a motor. As the motor turns, all the prisms revolve together. A limit switch is used to detect when the flat sides line up together. This whole assembly is mounted in a shallow box. Three posters are cut up and slices of each affixed around the prisms in such a way that at each of the limit stops, a complete poster is visible. A cyclic timer relay closes briefly to start the motor every few seconds; the limit switch keeps it running until it hits a stop position.
I believe this kind of sign is not allowed near busy road junctions.
Je fume. Tu fumes. Nous fûmes!
otherwise, Pol Pot would have won
Your ideas intrigue me. Please subscribe me to your newsletter.
Seriously, what do you mean?
All errors in this comment are mine. Corrections are considered a derivative work, and punishable under copyright law.
Shades of Minority Report...
But imagine the possibilities.
A series of sci-fi books by Stephen Baxter (The Manifold Sequence) describe technology like this.
They use flat, flexible view screens that can be used anywhere.
This is very exciting.
But of course it will be used for advertising...
Has anybody thought of active camoflague yet?
It would work great on the polygonal slab-sides of an M1-Abrahams tank...
Just think... you look down the street and think that the pepsi-cola vending machine looked a little distorted, but it could just be the dust and heat... and then a voice crackles over your radio "Hammer 34... in position..."
which is when you notice that there are a set of treads incongrously sitting under the pepsi cola mahine and most of a bus stop.
On the other hand if tanks could hide in the city as well as a human covered in tree branches and dirt can hide in the jungle somebody had better come up with a foolproof IFF system or we're in for a LOT of friendly fire incidents.
The Sept 12 dead tree edition of the Wall Street Journal had an interesting article on companies that deploy billboards that change throughout the day -- one intended application for these digital ink billboards.
The most interesting variant uses a roadside scanner that detects which radio stations are tuned in on the various cars going by the sign. The system then aggregates the data on who is listening to what and decides what ad message to put up. If most people are listening to the game, maybe an ad for the local sports bar will appear. If a cluster of classical music listeners drives past, then an ad for season tickets to the opera might briefly appear.
There's no word on whether the system can tell which MP3 file you are listening to. Yet.
Two wrongs don't make a right, but three lefts do.
I'm curious about the "tiny helix-shaped particles." What the heck are they?
computerlady - a brand new Slash-daughter - alone, but no longer invisible, in the
The obligatory Minority Report reference here for future advertising.
Now with RFID technology, adds can be specifically directed at individuals. Brrrr.
..........FULL STOP.
I remember seeing this technology well over a year ago (maybe 2 or 3) where they were using this "smart paper" for electronic price tags in stores. As prices changed (e.g. for a sale) the store computer would simply send a signal to the paper to change the content.
This was only available in black and white (well black and light grey anyway) but they were discussing how to do colour back then. This is mealy an extension of that technology.
This will be interesting for making redundant traditional billboards as they it will reduce the costs involved in bill posting (at the expense of jobs (I imaging) but that's technology) and obsolete billboards which display multiple adverts (usually by having a motorised system of rotating panels). Never the less I can't see it replacing certain screens in Time Square and London's Piccadilly as motion video still packs a greater advertising punch.
Now the only question is that when the ASA (Advertising Standards Authority) complains that an adverts content is too raunchy and should be removed (e.g. those wonderbra adds that allegedly caused car crashes through driver distraction), can be removed as soon as the decision is taken which will either cause a reduction or a dramatic increase in shock advertising).
Oh well time will tell.
Just my 0.02
If you get modded down for a first post... What do you get for a last post?
It's also another opportunity for you Republicans to sell out your country to crooked businessmen, don't forget.
Hi,
A selection of electronic paper advertising boards have been in use in Blackfrias station, London for several years now.
They do not look like LCD screen, they look like paper and they have a viewing angle to match.
See Don't Touch that Radio Button, You're on Billboard Detection for a freely accessible version of this story. It sounds like the system can detect leakage from car radio antennas, although some people are skeptical of its accuracy.
Two wrongs don't make a right, but three lefts do.
Read a history book, you'll see that pretty much every major technological or engineering feat ever achieved can be traced back to military purposes.
There are 10 kinds of people: those who understand binary, and those who don't.
Actually, that's essentially what makes a fuel cell different from a battery. You just keep supplying fuel to the fuel cell and it keeps producing electricity. So, no, you can "recharge" them as in rechargeable batteries. You "re-fuel" them like you do with your car. The most likely way that will happen for consumer electronics is buying hydrogen cartridges. Whether or not that is cheaper than the electricity you use to recharge batteries now or not will be a matter of economics that aren't yet completely worked out.
Im not sure if this stuff is flexible? That seems to be an issue nobody addressed, but if it is this seems like technology the military could use to create active camouflage. Just take a pic of the view opposite the direction the vehicle is traveling and display it on the front and vice versa. Umm... If someone like me is thinking of this they already have it.
You are the ones who are the ball-lickers. We're gonna fuck your mothers while you watch and cry like little bitches. Once we get to Hollywood and find those Miramax fucks who are making that movie, we're gonna make 'em eat our shit, then shit out our shit, then eat their shit which is made up of our shit that we made 'em eat. Then you're all fucking next.
Love,
Jay and Silent Bob
Karma: NaN
it will dissappear very quickly, and wind up hung on my bedroom wall.. hee hee.. anybody have a flatbed truck in the virginia area?
You mean like the lawyers whose lawsuits are driving up malpractice insurance, and driving doctors out of business?
oh...wait...that's the Democrats that are supporting those weasels...
I'm glad this is finally ready for an application. Mainly because it's a reflective rather than emissive display. That means when ambient light is brighter, so is the display, so it should look fine in sunlight. This is unlike CRTs and backlit LCDs which look washed out in bright light. This would free us nerds from lurking in dimly lit, mushroom-conducive workspaces. None of which is to say that this company has finally "solved" the problem, but a first real application is a big step!
The article describes the billboard as "...an innovation by a New York-based display technology company whose name, Magink, is a combination of the words magic and ink."
Lucky they mentioned that. At first I thought the name was a combination of the words "Ma" and "Gink".
TYFYA,
--#>SurturZ
actually, no, it was deployed in 2000 or 2001 in boston. so it's not even the first real application.
US Citizen living abroad? Register to vote!
When the Democrat vs. Republican civil war happens, I'm going to be the first to sign up on the Democrat side. It'd going to be fun watching all that yuppie scum try to fight a war.
it doesn't emit light, it only reflects it.
if i got a new flatscreen of this stuff for my computer, i'd lose my 'soothing green glow'!
// "Can't clowns and pirates just -try- to get along?"
You forgot American military operations in Bosnia, Somalia, and Kosovo. Or are you claiming Desert Fox was a war and was the first "Iraq" that you mentioned?
When I was studying U.S. history in the late 1990s, I learned that at that time, the United States Congress had not declared a "war" since World War II. Operations in Korea were officially a "police action", and operations in Vietnam were a "conflict".
Will I retire or break 10K?
That's because it IS a liquid crystal display. The little helical molecules that they talk about are cholesteric liquid crystals. Cholesteric displays have different characteristics than ordinary laptop/PDA displays, but they still have a viewing angle problem. Cholesteric display technology, pioneered by researchers at Kent State University, has been around for 10 years or more by now.
By the way, the reason that this technology isn't suitable for small e-books, portables, laptops, etc, is that it's actually THREE DISPLAYS (cyan, yellow, and magenta) stacked one on top of the other.
when you can only write each bit a few thousand times, your disk is pretty much useless to run a modern OS off.
There exist specialized flash file systems that perform sector wear management, which eases wear and tear on frequently modified sectors, especially those containing directories and log files. A CompactFlash cartridge typically has such wear management on the drive's built-in controller.
If you give the thing enough SDRAM to hold the apps and the /tmp folder without swapping, and you run wear management on everything else, a CF cartridge should last quite a while. If that fails, use an IBM CF Microdrive; it still uses quite low current but may last longer than flash memory.
Will I retire or break 10K?
It has the appearance of an LCD with it's poor viewing angle.
This is entirely the point. If only one driver can see the ad at a given time, the billboard owner can sell more targeted advertising space based on the make and model of the car approaching the billboard.
Besides, LCD viewing angles have got a lot better over the past years. Even in mid-1999, when Rose-Hulman was putting together Acer TravelMate 721TX laptop bundles for its incoming freshmen, the viewing angles were wide enough not to cause a problem.
Will I retire or break 10K?
5mm wide pixels means 200 pixels to the meter. This means that a 5m by 4m display would have about the same pixel count as the 1024x768 pixel display I'm typing this on. Widen it to 7m by 4m, and you have a movie screen.
Will I retire or break 10K?
Based on that DPI, at the size of a billboard, i don't know of any videocard in the world that could drive something like that.
OK, one video card probably couldn't handle this resolution, but imagine video cards in a Beowulf cluster. Give each blade the job of driving 1024x1024 pixels' worth of the image, and you have implemented a parallel method of image rendering that is commonly called "tile based rendering".
Will I retire or break 10K?
I know of someone, hehe, that grabbed a marker from the tray under one of those plastic whiteboards and wrote in big letters: PERMANENT MARKER!. Then he looked at the marker he wrote it with - OMG! It WAS a permanent marker. This person I know of was very glad nobody was in the room to witness this aparently malicious, but truely accidental vandalism. The person discreetly left the room and 'booked it'.
Eat at Joe's.
My question is, if this thing can run at 70 FPS, how long is it before thy have short video clips on the boards? This would be pretty damn useful... commercials everywhere. It would cetainly gain more attention than your standard billboard... Imagine a city with those placed strategically (i.e. near areas with horrible traffic). People would have nothing better to do than watch them, and knowing traffic in some cities, would be there for several minutes. A commercial on one of these billboards might have more people watching than the same commercial during an important sporting event... OK, so ordinary billboards have similar advantages, but more people would pay attention to a short video clip than to a sign, right?
"73% of quotes on the Internet are made up" -Ben Franklin
You have to watch nearly the entire movie
30 MB at 16 MB per hour? I watched it (and liked it) because I'm lucky enough to live in an area that offers high-speed Internet access, but some people don't have either nearly two hours to sit and wait for a movie to download or $200,000 for the broadband setup fee.
Will I retire or break 10K?
Hey hey hey... I like my dark crawl spaces. Being a reflective display means a light would be necessary to view it. Maybe they could backlight this too, though.
You do realize that all of these technologies do require power when the screen changes, right? So if you're doing video you're consuming power. This may be one reason it's called "digital paper", not "low-power video". And, as such, the chief applications will be replacing static paper displays with mostly-static digital paper displays.
Chelloveck
I give up on debugging. From now on, SIGSEGV is a feature.
a billboard flashing red and yellow advertising viagra
VIAGRA(tm) (sildenafil citrate) is a blue pill. Why would Pfizer's advertisement for a blue pill have a red and yellow motif?
Will I retire or break 10K?
I'd rather be on the conservative side. That way when all the liberals declare themselves "Conscientious objectors" and flee to Canada, we will be able to declare victory.
A new life awaits you in the Off-world colonies. The chance to begin again in a golden land of opportunity and adventure. New climate, recreational facilities...
-buzz
It used to be so difficult to take control of a billboard. If they start going digital, it will be MUCH easier.
Imagine the teenagers of the future... leaving the gift that keeps on giving. They could have graffiti that changes by remote control.
... or the nastiness that could happen?
Imagine a national press conference and suddenly, the wall behind the speaker changes to show a particularly embarrassing photo from the speakers' past. The networks would probably be in delay, so they might have a chance to roll to another camera. Think of the fun you could have?
-- No sig for you!
any reason for the frame rate to be so fast?
Most 35mm movie theaters show films at 24 frames per second (but usually each frame is shown 2 times, for 48 Htz). Fast enough to fool the eye.
NTSC is fractionally less than 30 frames per second.
These lower frame rates are fast enough to fool the eye/brain into perceiving motion. (Although, since I used to be a licensed film projectionist, I can usually spot dirt or a splice mark that's on a single frame of film when watching a movie (24fps)...)
So why the added complexity of a 70fps system?
-mrv
I always kind of wondered why they don't just run DC to the jack in houses and have one big transformer. Heck, build a transformer into the back of each jack if you're worried about energy loss.
The world is neither black nor white nor good nor evil, only many shades of CowboyNeal.
Cheers!
"The only good windmill is a tilted windmill."
...of course this technology makes sense!
This ignores, of course, people who are using plastic instead of paper (what is this magink stuff made of again?).
Economics states that the cost of advertising is passed on to the consumer. Thus the higher the cost of advertising, the more the consumer pays.
How again is this technology "good"?
Feloneous
So why don't they? Cost? Size? Display quality? Anyone in the know?
One of the original killer pop ups developed in WWII and used extensively in Vietnam, the "Bouncing Betty" would wait until your foot left the mine and then Pop Up(tm) to about 3 feet and blast outward in a circular pattern. Carnage ensued.
Learn more at How Stuff Works
I park my car in the middle of summer. As I get out and lock up, the car senses the temperature and time of day, the body turns white and the windows all go mirror-refelctive. When I get back, the inside of the car is ambient air temperature instead of 140F.
In the winter, the car body goes black and the windows stay clear, keeping the inside warm and reducing the snow and ice buildup.
In either case, I come out of the shopping center, push a button on my keychain, and the car's color starts flashing between international orange and white/black. Quieter than chirping the horn/alarm, and works better in daylight than flashing the headlights.
To a Lisp hacker, XML is S-expressions in drag.
Generally, bash is superior to python in those environments where python is not installed.
Does this mean in the future, my monitor might become a big $500 color magnadoodle?
Put this billboard real close to highway and make it look like an offramp into a cave like the old looney toons.
WhatMeWorry
while these have never been declared per say, as in the WWII declaration, it continues to be said in the media, "we ARE AT WAR!!!" with these abstract ideas; Terror(?) and addictions Drugs(?)
~~I went to battle M.C. Escher, but drew a blank...~~
The spec says contrast is 14:1, which is not particularly good. Ordinary bilboards are printed with contrast ratios as much as ten times better than that. Refresh time of two seconds is about 140 times slower than what was claimed in the slashdork post, though probably still better than the mechanical types with little pivoting squares. 4096 colors means just 16 shades of gray like in the old Amiga days -- with 5mm pixels expect quite substantial minimum viewing distance before dithering eliminates visible banding. The thing dies if the active thermal control systems fail. The website looks like a bad flashback to 1997, and it is littered with obvious spelling mistakes. Not a single close-up photo is provided of the product. Golly, I guess I'm such a grouch today but this just looks like a dud.
things like Tornadoes, or Hurricanes, or Mondays, or Bad Vibes or ghosts... they're scary
a huge amount of time that i spend on a computer the display stays static. or at least large parts of it stay static. it certainly doesn't need to refresh a huge amount of time.
US Citizen living abroad? Register to vote!
google "psyops iraq"
PSYOPS = advertising and the military merge
This has huge potential for stage plays.
I just can't be bothered.
And you could put it on a convertable Viper, so it could change color from red, to grey when it morphed into an armored hard-top. And you could use it to fight crime.
Cause a lot of appliances (like light bulbs, kettles, etc) can run just fine off AC. The cost of transformers is pretty much defined by how much iron you need (iron=weight) which in turn is defined by how much power you need to transform. So you wouldn't save much money by amalgamating them. I'm sure there are other reasons.
Karma police, I've given all I can, it's not enough, I've given all I can, but we're still on the payroll.
A few well placed speaker magnets and you have converted an expensive ad to installation art.
Q.
Insert Signature Here
What's the matter, too much of a pussy to fight? You'd rather just let your enemy run away?
Fucking hypocrite. Rush Limbaugh, Dan Quayle, and George W. Bush all served admirably in foreign wars, didn't they?
Also, since the republican party is the party of shoving Jesus down your throat and up your ass, and conscientious objecting is a religious thing, shouldn't all the republicans be running for the golf courses and cul-de-sacs of Canada?
About the only republican that I have a shred of respect for is Bob Dole. The rest of them are wastes of oxygen and carbon and should be treated as such.
even vector animation would have to be rasterized at some point.
A 3D video game's display is in essence a vector animation made of thousands of triangles with textures, and the existing 3D video cards do a good job of rasterizing them.
you would a hell of a lot of memory and bandwith to transfer that amount of data.
How much bandwidth is there between a CPU and a video card over an AGP 8x port? How much bandwidth is there between the video chip and the DDR SDRAM on the video card?
But I agree that for displays of billboard size, it's almost never going to be worthwhile to render them that finely. A resolution of 200 pixels per meter is probably enough for a billboard.
Will I retire or break 10K?
hi there fuckhead spongman shithead.
you never, evre shut the fuck up.
you rattle of lies, babble, and your basically come here regularly to live vicariously.
you are a sad, pathetic loser. fucking idiot.